We'll apart from being a bit of a pain - they are far from evil, and have a place in a good habitat design plan where you are striving for diversity, as they typically are able to tip over and remain alive - limb rooting, they do make pretty awesome living horizontal cover along field edges especially those where your trying to feather out the woods line...
I saw a article where someone was standing up for the beaten down tree....
"The rest of the reasons we don’t like box elders are, ironically, the very reasons that we should love them. Box elders are scrappy and hard to kill, and they drop leaves and fruits even into the winter. Leaves and fruits (and box elder bugs) may be annoying to homeowners who have to clean them up, but they are absolutely crucial to the ecosystem as a whole. Many different types of wildlife rely on those fruits and leaves that persist on the tree, especially late in the season when food supplies become scarce. The list of wildlife that depends on box elders to survive the winter is so long that I will share only one of the most special figures with you now. There are 285 species of Lepidoptera (moths and butterflies) that depend on box elder to survive their caterpillar stage. If we say good-bye to box elders, we might as well say good-bye to almost three hundred species of moths and butterflies! Keep in mind that insects and caterpillars are the largest diet component of insectivorous birds and that the populations of most bird species are limited by food availability. Fewer box elders means fewer insects which translates into fewer birds which has the potential to crash the whole food web."
Just food for thought,... in the past I have cut up most of the ones I have on my property thinking of them as a trash tree but as my goals for the property have changed from farming the land to CRP and promoting wildlife I've made a habit of leaving a few of the trees - a tangled mess of a tree, it is - which may be aesthetically unpleasant to the human eye but still has some value... The whole discussion reminds me of the milk weed plant, in the past the NRCS has made me clip and kill the plant or risk being kicked out of my government programs because its was considered a worthless and essentially noxious weed to this spring where they are paying me (cost sharing) to plant it.